In the end, hopefully, you’ll be able to find a new whiskey for your own bar cart.Īlso Read: The Top 5 UPROXX Bourbon Posts Of The Last Six Months I’m listing all the whiskey winners below with my own tasting notes, using the distiller’s or Ascot Awards judges’ notes where necessary. For this list, the double-platinum winners all went into the final’s Thunderdome for a best-in-category showdown before Minnick alone picks the “best in show” bottles. The medals are “honorable mention,” “gold,” “platinum,” and “double platinum” based on a double-blind panel of judges making those calls one dram at a time. Just to quickly clarify, Fred Minnick’s Ascot Awards are the new kids on the block with this year being the second installment.

And while we love all spirits around here, we’re going to focus on the bourbon and Scotch whisky categories (with the rest of the winners listed below). To that end, we were lucky enough to get the exclusive “best of category” winners from this year’s Ascot Awards. You have to dig into the actual “best in category” bottles to see what truly rose to the top, that’s how. But with so many medals hanging off those bottlenecks, how do you find the true “best” bottles from each competition? It’s kind of true, a lot of bottles end up with little stickers or neck hangers touting medals from various awards. It seems like medals are handed out to bottles of booze at a breakneck pace in the whiskey and spirits world these days.

Fred minnick best bourbon 2021